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Comment by DC-3 | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can see, Mozilla have no reason to be losing money other than their own mismanagement.

This is an article about MDN, not Mozilla. How exactly does MDN bring money? Do you suggest MDN should be a revenue source? Or do you expect Mozilla to maintain the MDN for free eternally just because?

This is seriously entitled. Mozilla gave us an amazing resource, entirely for free. This attitude isn't right, it's toxic and harmful.

Mozilla is in a spot of difficulty, and instead of taking a resource that is operating entirely at a loss down, they're taking the engineering steps to ensure thez resource can outlive them.

That their mismanagement caused them the difficulty is entirely irrelevant here. It could have happened in a myriad of other ways. We should be praising Mozilla and the MDN tech team for the steps they're taking in making sure the MDN can live on.

It's stuff like MDN that attracts donations.

Fun fact: I have an open source repo with millions of downloads, tens of thousands of active users, and, for at least a year, a prominently displayed donate button. How much in donations do you think it took in over its lifetime?

Hint: it's less than $200.

Donations don't really work.

Which one is it? Maybe you will win a handful of donations here.

I guess its https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim

Thanks for the vim plugin for vscode! It's quite useful and usable. fwiw i don't think you get many donations because it looks like an official microsoft backed vscode plugin so why would people throw money at microsoft. that said, i do think you are correct in that people in general do not donate to open source individually that much.

We didn’t have many for Firebug either, though we appreciated those we got and funneled them to new contributors living outside the States where it made a difference.

>for at least a year, a prominently displayed donate button.

Just to be sure, are you referring to the "BuyMeCoffee" button on the GitHub page for the extension (https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim)?

Nah, we used to have a more prominent link. It's been removed since I stopped developing on the extension.

At the bottom of a long scroll isn't something I'd consider prominent. I'd probably change it to simply "Donate" as a button, and put it with the badges at the top. Red, purple or orange as a contrasting color from the blue and green badges.

> Or do you expect Mozilla to maintain the MDN for free eternally just because?

That's what I expect of a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining one of the last two remaining major browser engines, yes.

I didn't know that becoming non-profit meant that money is free :)

What are their revenue streams?

Now that antitrust is happening anyways, Google's main reason for shoveling money at them is going away.

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